Book-It 'o12! Book #4
The Fifty Books Challenge, year three! (Years one, two, and three just in case you're curious.) This was a secondhand find rec from a family member.
Title: Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage by Christopher Andersen
Details: Copyright 2009, Harper Collins Books
Synopsis (By Way of Front and Back Flaps): "They exploded onto the world scene and within a matter of a few short years captured the ultimate political prize. In so doing, they became a First Couple like no other: He-the biracial son of a free-spirited Kansas-born woman and a mercurial Kenyan father who abandoned him at an early age-was raised in Hawaii and Indonesia, educated at Columbia and Harvard, and launched his political career in America's heartland. She, by contrast, was the product of a solidly middle-American family with roots planted firmly in Chicago's working-class South Side-paving the way for her to achieve her dreams of an Ivy League education and a position at one of the nation's top law firms.
By the time they claimed the White House in one of the most hotly contested presidential races in modern history, Barack and Michelle Obama were seen by millions around the world as the new Jack and Jackie Kennedy- brilliant, attractive, elegant, youthful, exciting. Accompanied by their two young daughters, Malia and Sasha, the Obamas would arrive at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with the promise of a new Camelot all but assured.
Given the obvious historic significance of what they have accomplished together, the marriage of Barack and Michelle stands as one of the great personal and political partnerships in American history. Yet, incredibly, the true nature of that relationship has remained a mystery. Until now.
In the style of his No. 1 New York Times bestsellers The Day Diana Died and The Day John Died, as well as his bestselling books about the Kennedys, the Clintons, and the Bushes, author Christopher Andersen draws on important sources-some speaking here for the first time-to paint the first complete, compelling portrait of America's first black First Family.
Among the many intriguing insights and stunning revelations:
• New behind-the-scenes details of the Obamas' courtship and marriage-and the lovers who went before.
• The early tragedies that shaped both Barack's and Michelle's personalities, and how those events haunt them to this day. Also, new information about Barack's rootless childhood, at times tortured adolescence, and the true extent of his early drug use.
• How Barack's ambition put a strain on their relationship from the very beginning, how close the Obamas really came to breaking up, and how Michelle made the difficult decision that saved their marriage.
• The little-known near-tragedy that brought Barack and Michelle closer than they had ever been.
• How Michelle may have saved her husband's presidential campaign, and her surprising behind-the-scenes role as the president's chief adviser.
• The pressures and delights of raising two young girls in the relentless glare of the media, and how, like Jack and Jackie Kennedy before them, Barack and Michelle strive to make the lives of America's two most famous children as "normal" as possible.
Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage is an intimate and ultimately riveting look at their unique partnership, and the humor, faith, fortitude, and grace that defines it. It is, above all, an extraordinary American love story."
Why I Wanted to Read It: There's a controversial book out on the Obamas which I've requested from the library. In the meantime, there was this book spat out by the secondhand market machinists within my family.
How I Liked It: This book is a calico of information gleaned from the massive amounts of press devoted to the President and First Lady and the other books written both about and by them (Dreams From My Father, The Audacity of Hope). Most of the time, the author's work is sloppy and frequently dates and minute information are actually incorrect. This gets increasingly annoying as the author will tweak a solid fact (or several) about a date or event (or the date of the event) to play to a greater theme he's obviously trying to portray. The entire book feels extremely slap-dash and given the publication date, it's not surprising. The only thing really original about this book is the level to which the author can parlay mostly well-known quotes and information into a very narrow narrative and not be the "author" of some very forwarded, poorly-spelled e-mail devoid of punctuation, but be instead (as his bio attests) a New York Times best-selling author with over twenty books to his credit.
If you are assuming that the pastiche the author has managed to cobble together is hagiographic, you're wrong. After all, when you don't have enough information on a public figure for it to be a revelation, why not turn that information into a controversial hatchet job, particularly when the public figures in question are riding high on popularity?
I have not read what I've heard is the author's most well-known other work, American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power, which I've gathered from excerpts and editorial reviews generally portrays Clinton as a shrill, domineering, manipulative shrew. I'm going to guess that a certain theme has to run in his portrayals, since Michelle Obama is painted in this book as a nasty, cold, bitter, emasculating, and even slightly dangerous woman, who harbors sentiments that (quite frequently, according to the author) embody every racist caricature the Right can conjure. This is when Michelle isn't draping herself in ridiculously expensive designer togs and threatening every male in the room, of course.
Whether she's "realizing she had been privileged by affirmative action" at Harvard and, according to her "friend and classmate", being "very comfortable with that (the author easily contradicts himself: he describes Michelle's frustration with white students demanding to know her and other black students' SAT scores to see how far the bar had allegedly been lowered for them and in the same paragraph he caps with her classmate's quotes, he deems assumptions of lowering standards "most galling" of Michelle's discomfort) or sneering over her the tears of her inner city charity work colleagues with affluent backgrounds who'd never seen urban poverty so close for the first time ("Do you think these people want to hear some rich white girl crying? They've got real problems! Give me a break!" pg 96), it's very clear to the author that Michelle has a history of discomfort with white people. He quotes the same classmate who noticed Michelle's comfort with affirmative action benefiting her when it comes to the Black Law Students Association, where she "was not reluctant to speak out on racial issues." When it came to the debates she engaged her classmate in regarding "the condition of black folks in America", her friend ominously notes "She's got a temper." (pg 95)
Lest you think any of this was the result of youthful delusion, the author not only documents Michelle's attempts to endear herself on the campaign trail to predominantly black audiences by "invariably" opening her stump speeches with "On behalf on my church home and my pastor, Reverent Jeremiah Wright, I bring greetings." It was also Michelle, according to the author, that lobbied Barack not to abandon Wright when it came to the massive scandal that would erupt later, insisting that he was family. This is quite a different take from the Michelle portrayed in Game Change who was depicted as "never having liked Wright" and tolerating his presence based on where she and her family lived as well as the fact Barack seemed to draw so much strength from his relationship with the reverend.
Even a story as seemingly innocent as a teenage Michelle saving up baby-sitting money to buy a designer purse (when questioned by her mother about how she could spend three hundred dollars on a purse, Michelle angles that she won't have to buy another bag for years; her mother's choice in accessories, cheaper purses, will mean that she'll have to keep buying) which sounds more a concoction (or at least the tinting) of a campaign staffer of a family story about Michelle's work ethic and rational mind even as a clothes-crazy teen has a sinister edge in the author's words. He sniffs that Michelle "developed a taste for the finer things early on" and a story of a teen wheedling her way out of potential trouble the author paints as some sort of sociopathic activity, capped off by the fact her mother (whom we are led to believe the story comes from) admits her daughter was exactly right (Michelle had the purse for "quite a while" while her mother went through several).
As far as the campaign trail was concerned, far from being the devoted spouse, Michelle is a petty, brusque, and selfish creature, fuming over "Obama Girl", responding to a question of how she felt about Bill Clinton's attacks on her husband with "I'd like to rip his eyes out!" (before adding a "Kidding!" after a disapproving look from a staffer), and grudgingly allowing her husband to run although making it perfectly clear he belonged in a stable, high paying job to support their children.
The treacly chapter opening quotes aside, the author portrays the Obama marriage as repeatedly being on the rocks for the mere fact Michelle was just too dang headstrong. Her fury over Barack's habitual neglect over household chores, their relationship, and even their children (the author claims that Michelle would duck out without warning early mornings to work with her personal trainer and leave Barack to get the girls ready for school, something she purportedly did "for me.").
So apparently, for this author, Michelle and Hillary Clinton, at least from what I've gleaned, are depicted fairly similarly. I can't speak for Bill, but in this book, Barack must be separated into two entities. There's the man and then there's the series of paranoid Right wing conspiracy talking points that the author feeds into (including his aunt's residence, his connection to Islam, his relationships with Bill Ayers and Reverend Wright, and the myth of the media that handled him with kid gloves-- you know, all, not just Fox News, while giving panting coverage to each and every one of those topics and several more smearing and damaging). Barack the man (separate from aforementioned author's feeding of Right talking points) comes off fairly well, his only real failing in the Obama marriage is simply being too much of a "guy"-- incapable of doing laundry, given to leaving his clothes and dishes around the house-- and therefore about as worthy of Michelle's ire as just about any man. Occasionally his ego is depicted as massive, but nothing worthy of the put-downs and jibes Michelle gives him. The author implicitly suggests that somehow by Michelle's at best reluctance about and at worst vendetta against Obama's political aspirations is utterly selfish and what's more, ungrateful: denying the very thing that led her to where she is today.
So this begs the question: are all females the author writes about subject to such characterization? Are all women in power (or damn close) somehow suspect to this author?
The book is a waste: at best, it's a sloppy repackaging of what you already know. At worst, it's a sloppy repackaging of what you already know painted with a subtly misogynist and at times racist brush.
Notable: A troubling sentence occurs within a chapter describing Michelle's ascent through school.
“A huge opportunity opened up for Michelle in 1975, when the Chicago Board of Education established the Whitney M. Young Magnet High School in the city's West Loop. Aimed at attracting high-achieving students of all races, Whitney Young-- named after the longtime executive director of the Urban League-- was supposed to be 40 percent black, 40 percent Caucasian, and 20 percent 'other'. As it turns out, it was 70 percent African American when Michelle arrived. Still, it offered the best college prep courses available, as well as clasrooms and facilities that rivaled those in the nation.” (pg 84)
Can you spot the troubling word?
Title: Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage by Christopher Andersen
Details: Copyright 2009, Harper Collins Books
Synopsis (By Way of Front and Back Flaps): "They exploded onto the world scene and within a matter of a few short years captured the ultimate political prize. In so doing, they became a First Couple like no other: He-the biracial son of a free-spirited Kansas-born woman and a mercurial Kenyan father who abandoned him at an early age-was raised in Hawaii and Indonesia, educated at Columbia and Harvard, and launched his political career in America's heartland. She, by contrast, was the product of a solidly middle-American family with roots planted firmly in Chicago's working-class South Side-paving the way for her to achieve her dreams of an Ivy League education and a position at one of the nation's top law firms.
By the time they claimed the White House in one of the most hotly contested presidential races in modern history, Barack and Michelle Obama were seen by millions around the world as the new Jack and Jackie Kennedy- brilliant, attractive, elegant, youthful, exciting. Accompanied by their two young daughters, Malia and Sasha, the Obamas would arrive at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with the promise of a new Camelot all but assured.
Given the obvious historic significance of what they have accomplished together, the marriage of Barack and Michelle stands as one of the great personal and political partnerships in American history. Yet, incredibly, the true nature of that relationship has remained a mystery. Until now.
In the style of his No. 1 New York Times bestsellers The Day Diana Died and The Day John Died, as well as his bestselling books about the Kennedys, the Clintons, and the Bushes, author Christopher Andersen draws on important sources-some speaking here for the first time-to paint the first complete, compelling portrait of America's first black First Family.
Among the many intriguing insights and stunning revelations:
• New behind-the-scenes details of the Obamas' courtship and marriage-and the lovers who went before.
• The early tragedies that shaped both Barack's and Michelle's personalities, and how those events haunt them to this day. Also, new information about Barack's rootless childhood, at times tortured adolescence, and the true extent of his early drug use.
• How Barack's ambition put a strain on their relationship from the very beginning, how close the Obamas really came to breaking up, and how Michelle made the difficult decision that saved their marriage.
• The little-known near-tragedy that brought Barack and Michelle closer than they had ever been.
• How Michelle may have saved her husband's presidential campaign, and her surprising behind-the-scenes role as the president's chief adviser.
• The pressures and delights of raising two young girls in the relentless glare of the media, and how, like Jack and Jackie Kennedy before them, Barack and Michelle strive to make the lives of America's two most famous children as "normal" as possible.
Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage is an intimate and ultimately riveting look at their unique partnership, and the humor, faith, fortitude, and grace that defines it. It is, above all, an extraordinary American love story."
Why I Wanted to Read It: There's a controversial book out on the Obamas which I've requested from the library. In the meantime, there was this book spat out by the secondhand market machinists within my family.
How I Liked It: This book is a calico of information gleaned from the massive amounts of press devoted to the President and First Lady and the other books written both about and by them (Dreams From My Father, The Audacity of Hope). Most of the time, the author's work is sloppy and frequently dates and minute information are actually incorrect. This gets increasingly annoying as the author will tweak a solid fact (or several) about a date or event (or the date of the event) to play to a greater theme he's obviously trying to portray. The entire book feels extremely slap-dash and given the publication date, it's not surprising. The only thing really original about this book is the level to which the author can parlay mostly well-known quotes and information into a very narrow narrative and not be the "author" of some very forwarded, poorly-spelled e-mail devoid of punctuation, but be instead (as his bio attests) a New York Times best-selling author with over twenty books to his credit.
If you are assuming that the pastiche the author has managed to cobble together is hagiographic, you're wrong. After all, when you don't have enough information on a public figure for it to be a revelation, why not turn that information into a controversial hatchet job, particularly when the public figures in question are riding high on popularity?
I have not read what I've heard is the author's most well-known other work, American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power, which I've gathered from excerpts and editorial reviews generally portrays Clinton as a shrill, domineering, manipulative shrew. I'm going to guess that a certain theme has to run in his portrayals, since Michelle Obama is painted in this book as a nasty, cold, bitter, emasculating, and even slightly dangerous woman, who harbors sentiments that (quite frequently, according to the author) embody every racist caricature the Right can conjure. This is when Michelle isn't draping herself in ridiculously expensive designer togs and threatening every male in the room, of course.
Whether she's "realizing she had been privileged by affirmative action" at Harvard and, according to her "friend and classmate", being "very comfortable with that (the author easily contradicts himself: he describes Michelle's frustration with white students demanding to know her and other black students' SAT scores to see how far the bar had allegedly been lowered for them and in the same paragraph he caps with her classmate's quotes, he deems assumptions of lowering standards "most galling" of Michelle's discomfort) or sneering over her the tears of her inner city charity work colleagues with affluent backgrounds who'd never seen urban poverty so close for the first time ("Do you think these people want to hear some rich white girl crying? They've got real problems! Give me a break!" pg 96), it's very clear to the author that Michelle has a history of discomfort with white people. He quotes the same classmate who noticed Michelle's comfort with affirmative action benefiting her when it comes to the Black Law Students Association, where she "was not reluctant to speak out on racial issues." When it came to the debates she engaged her classmate in regarding "the condition of black folks in America", her friend ominously notes "She's got a temper." (pg 95)
Lest you think any of this was the result of youthful delusion, the author not only documents Michelle's attempts to endear herself on the campaign trail to predominantly black audiences by "invariably" opening her stump speeches with "On behalf on my church home and my pastor, Reverent Jeremiah Wright, I bring greetings." It was also Michelle, according to the author, that lobbied Barack not to abandon Wright when it came to the massive scandal that would erupt later, insisting that he was family. This is quite a different take from the Michelle portrayed in Game Change who was depicted as "never having liked Wright" and tolerating his presence based on where she and her family lived as well as the fact Barack seemed to draw so much strength from his relationship with the reverend.
Even a story as seemingly innocent as a teenage Michelle saving up baby-sitting money to buy a designer purse (when questioned by her mother about how she could spend three hundred dollars on a purse, Michelle angles that she won't have to buy another bag for years; her mother's choice in accessories, cheaper purses, will mean that she'll have to keep buying) which sounds more a concoction (or at least the tinting) of a campaign staffer of a family story about Michelle's work ethic and rational mind even as a clothes-crazy teen has a sinister edge in the author's words. He sniffs that Michelle "developed a taste for the finer things early on" and a story of a teen wheedling her way out of potential trouble the author paints as some sort of sociopathic activity, capped off by the fact her mother (whom we are led to believe the story comes from) admits her daughter was exactly right (Michelle had the purse for "quite a while" while her mother went through several).
As far as the campaign trail was concerned, far from being the devoted spouse, Michelle is a petty, brusque, and selfish creature, fuming over "Obama Girl", responding to a question of how she felt about Bill Clinton's attacks on her husband with "I'd like to rip his eyes out!" (before adding a "Kidding!" after a disapproving look from a staffer), and grudgingly allowing her husband to run although making it perfectly clear he belonged in a stable, high paying job to support their children.
The treacly chapter opening quotes aside, the author portrays the Obama marriage as repeatedly being on the rocks for the mere fact Michelle was just too dang headstrong. Her fury over Barack's habitual neglect over household chores, their relationship, and even their children (the author claims that Michelle would duck out without warning early mornings to work with her personal trainer and leave Barack to get the girls ready for school, something she purportedly did "for me.").
So apparently, for this author, Michelle and Hillary Clinton, at least from what I've gleaned, are depicted fairly similarly. I can't speak for Bill, but in this book, Barack must be separated into two entities. There's the man and then there's the series of paranoid Right wing conspiracy talking points that the author feeds into (including his aunt's residence, his connection to Islam, his relationships with Bill Ayers and Reverend Wright, and the myth of the media that handled him with kid gloves-- you know, all, not just Fox News, while giving panting coverage to each and every one of those topics and several more smearing and damaging). Barack the man (separate from aforementioned author's feeding of Right talking points) comes off fairly well, his only real failing in the Obama marriage is simply being too much of a "guy"-- incapable of doing laundry, given to leaving his clothes and dishes around the house-- and therefore about as worthy of Michelle's ire as just about any man. Occasionally his ego is depicted as massive, but nothing worthy of the put-downs and jibes Michelle gives him. The author implicitly suggests that somehow by Michelle's at best reluctance about and at worst vendetta against Obama's political aspirations is utterly selfish and what's more, ungrateful: denying the very thing that led her to where she is today.
So this begs the question: are all females the author writes about subject to such characterization? Are all women in power (or damn close) somehow suspect to this author?
The book is a waste: at best, it's a sloppy repackaging of what you already know. At worst, it's a sloppy repackaging of what you already know painted with a subtly misogynist and at times racist brush.
Notable: A troubling sentence occurs within a chapter describing Michelle's ascent through school.
“A huge opportunity opened up for Michelle in 1975, when the Chicago Board of Education established the Whitney M. Young Magnet High School in the city's West Loop. Aimed at attracting high-achieving students of all races, Whitney Young-- named after the longtime executive director of the Urban League-- was supposed to be 40 percent black, 40 percent Caucasian, and 20 percent 'other'. As it turns out, it was 70 percent African American when Michelle arrived. Still, it offered the best college prep courses available, as well as clasrooms and facilities that rivaled those in the nation.” (pg 84)
Can you spot the troubling word?